Economic growth leaves out many Chinese

The divide is not simply between haves and have-nots or the coast and the interior. It is a fundamental split between opportunity and frustration, expectations and reality, ideological promises and day-to-day practices.

Evan Osnos writes from YANGSHUO, CHINA

January 15, 2006|By Evan Osnos, Tribune foreign correspondent

YANGSHUO, CHINA — At this lush clearing in the mountains of southeastern China, the Li River carves a rift between two centuries.

On the east bank, outdoor cafes offer fluffy cappuccinos and wireless Web access to Chinese and foreign vacationers, who stream downriver in double-decker cruise boats for an evening at a hotel in the hills. On the west bank, fishermen who haven't found their foothold in the tourist trade live in nondescript concrete homes and splash out from the muddy banks aboard primitive bamboo rafts while their water buffalo watch the world float by.

The facing shores straddle a divide of money, information and, ultimately, what flows from that: power. The gap between them captures the defining dynamic of China's march into the future. Never in the history of the world have so many people shared a single country, a single currency, a single government and so little else.

When we focus only on China's galloping growth, it is easy to visualize an inevitable climb out of the wasteful politics and violence that defined the nation's 20th Century. But how China manages growing polarization has emerged as a crucial factor in whether national growth continues or founders.

I am struck every day by some new measure of the divide. Appetizers on trendy Beijing menus cost the equivalent of an entire month's salary in the countryside. A single movie ticket in Shanghai would gobble up a civil servant's monthly take-home pay in the provinces. Such gaps are a jarring development in a society that long prided itself on being classless.

But the divide is not simply between haves and have-nots or the coast and the interior. It is a fundamental split between opportunity and frustration, expectations and reality, ideological promises and day-to-day practices.

As China racks up breathtaking gains in trade and quality of life, the resulting contradictions are increasingly volatile. Peasants and laborers who have lost confidence in the Communist Party's ability to protect their interests and rights are lashing out at corrupt local officials, or in some cases, wealthier countrymen. Villagers who once tolerated imperious local authorities are increasingly willing to protest or sue over injustices. They are paying a price in crackdowns and retribution.

Even as the country hurtles forward--mainland China will soon overtake France and the United Kingdom to become the world's fourth-largest economy -- civil unrest has reached a level not seen since the democracy protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989. In 2004 there were 74,000 acts of protest across the country, up from 10,000 recorded in official rolls a decade earlier.

In the most violent recent incident to reach the ears of foreign reporters, as many as 20 villagers in southern Guangdong province died in clashes with police over authorities' seizure of land for a power plant. News and criticism of the crackdown spread fast on the Internet, despite intense official pressure on Chinese journalists and villagers to keep quiet. (State media reported that three villagers died after police struck back in self-defense at a crowd out of control.)

Within hours, the incident had begotten a near-perfect metaphor for Chinese society today: two parallel realities, with propaganda chiefs and their ink-and-paper party organs on one side, and legions of Web- and mobile phone-equipped citizens on the other.

The Communist Party is all too aware that the problem threatens its hold on the future. In its latest effort to pacify the countryside, China's leaders last month pledged a major boost to rural investment in 2006, and on Jan. 1 they also abolished a 2,600-year-old agricultural tax. But a tax break is not what peasants are seeking. In case after case, China's rural millions have made clear that above all they seek transparency and the rule of law.

"I want to tell the whole world that this local government doesn't obey their own law," said Chen Guangcheng, a peasant activist who has been under virtual house arrest for four months, ever since he prepared to sue local family-planning authorities over abuses.

Chen's case is an acute example of the gap between official rhetoric and reality. After Chen voiced his accusations last year, central family-planning officials in Beijing publicly vowed to punish local authorities in his remote patch of eastern China's Shandong province. Yet months later, Chen, who is blind, and his wife remain under illegal detention, physically barred from leaving home by men stationed outside their front door. Ironically, he was able to receive phone calls one recent afternoon only because a power outage--common in fast-growing China--temporarily disabled local officials' phone-jamming equipment, he said.

Before his phone went dead again that afternoon, Chen said he expects his detention will end only when the central government matches its pledges with action.

"I am only wondering if the central government doesn't want to stop this," he said, "or doesn't have the capability to stop this."